Deadly attacks by Islamist extremists in Copenhagen and Paris haven’t eased European concerns about privacy in the wake of revelations by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, but they have helped inspire a renewed commitment to sharing intelligence about terrorist threats, according to U.S. officials who deal with allies on the issue.
“There’s no doubt about it. They recognize the threats,” Rep. Robert Pittenger told the Washington Examiner. “They also are beginning to get a better understanding of what we do to protect privacy.”
The North Carolina Republican traveled to Brussels during the Presidents Day recess to meet with parliamentarians from other NATO nations as a gunman in the Danish capital killed two people in separate attacks Saturday and early Sunday. The attacks were on a synagogue and at an event attended by the author of a controversial cartoon about the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.
Those incidents came in the wake of related attacks in Paris last month against a satirical magazine that had lampooned Muhammad, which was followed by an attack on a Jewish market. Seventeen people died in those attacks.
As chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Pittenger has led efforts to repair the damage caused by Snowden’s leaks to the media since they were first published in June 2013.
Officials have been saying for months that Snowden’s revelations have hurt efforts to thwart the Islamic State and other extremist groups by making them aware of U.S. intelligence collection methods, making it easier to avoid surveillance.
But the revelations also created problems with U.S. allies, most notably Germany, where a parliamentary committee is looking into Snowden’s claim that the NSA tapped Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.
Germany has been an important link in U.S. efforts to keep track of Islamist extremists. A June 2014 analysis by Der Spiegel of documents leaked by Snowden indicated that the NSA’s surveillance architecture in Germany, the largest in Europe, had been used to help identify terrorist targets for U.S. strikes. Such spying is illegal in Germany and thus poses a political problem for its government as a member of the anti-Islamic State coalition.
“The privacy concerns in Europe are significant, and not just in this area of sharing terrorism information but in all aspects of how private information is shared,” Francis X. Taylor, undersecretary of homeland security for intelligence and analysis, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Feb. 11.
The issue is of such great concern to the U.S. that President Obama addressed it directly with Merkel during her visit to the White House two weeks ago.
“I think there are still different assessments on individual issues there, but if we look at the sheer dimension of the terrorist threat, we are more than aware of the fact that we need to work together very closely,” Merkel said at a joint news conference after their meeting.
“And I, as German chancellor, want to state here very clearly that the institutions of the United States of America have provided us and still continue to provide us with a lot of very significant, very important information that also ensure our security. And we don’t want to do without this. There are other possibilities, through the cyberdialogue, for example, to continue to talk about the sort of protection of privacy versus data protection and so on, and security. But … combating terrorism was basically in the forefront today.”
The “Snowden effect” came during a period of “fairly dramatic” improvement in the sharing of information between U.S. and European intelligence agencies about specific individuals of concern, though the sharing of bulk surveillance data remains problematic, Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Feb. 11.
“Since that period we’ve seen an increased sense of shared threat among our European partners … There’s a bit of a pendulum swing to this process that is for the moment trending in a direction of more sharing and willingness to share information,” he said.
“The politics of this issue are very difficult for some of our European partners but as professional intelligence organizations working with each other I would argue that a lot goes on that is useful for us.”
European allies “clearly feel the grave concerns” in the wake of the latest attacks, Pittenger said, noting that it’s unfortunate “that it takes these kinds of acts to provide clear thinking on what needs to be done.”
